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Happy New Year Cognitive UX Designers!

I wish you all a fantastic New Year and hope you will keep discovering Cognitive Psychology & UX with me.

I've got an announcement to make: For the sake of better content and quality, I'm going to change to a bi-weekly newsletter.
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Cognitive UXD

Psychology in UX

When you think positive reinforcement, you might think of Pavlov’s dogs, the famous behavioural psychology experiment. It was Pavlov who coined the term “reinforcement” after he was able to condition dogs to salivate at the ring of a bell. In the UX world, we can use positive reinforcement in two ways. Positive reinforcement in UX:
The first, if you are employing an unconventional design feature, a non-traditional navigation, or unfamiliar architecture, you can train your users to utilize it and master it by rewarding their interaction with it. The second, and much more widespread, application is to impose it on the platform as a whole. You are not forming a particular behavior or habit. You simply want to encourage continued and repeated use of the website or mobile app in general.

This article broke down several areas of study relating to the brain, memory and the visual systems in humans to explain how these are relevant to UX.
10 Things to About Human Psychology That Should Inform UX Design:
- People Don't Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
- People Have Limitations
- People Make Mistakes
- Human Memory is Complicated
- People are Social
- People are Easily Distracted
- People Crave Information
- Most Mental Processing is Unconscious
- People Create Mental Models
- People Understand Visual Systems

Human Cognition

All the visual objects can be analyzed in terms of shape. For example, an average house may be perceived as a rectangle with a triangle on the top and the sun is often presented like a circle with lines around it. People may not always notice what figures and shapes surround them still they have a great impact on our consciousness and behavior. The science studying the influence of shapes on people is known as the psychology of shapes.

Human Memory

Psychologists like to make the distinction between two types of memory retrieval: recognition versus recall. Think of meeting a person on the street. You can often tell quite easily if you have seen her before, but coming up with her name (if the person is familiar) is a lot harder. The first process is recognition (you recognize the person as familiar); the second involves recall. Recognition refers to our ability to “recognize” an event or piece of information as being familiar, while recall designates the retrieval of related details from memory.

To better understand the differences between recognition and recall and why recognition is preferable in user interfaces, we need to take a small excursion into how the human memory works.

Human, AI and UX

Not too long ago humanity left behind its skeuomorphic interfaces. We became accustomed to the idea of buttons to tap on screens and swipes that moved content right or left. We learned that content could be out of view but within reach. We graduated to a flatter, more abstract representation that still inherits spatial metaphors and relationships but that are communicated more subtly and implicitly. We stripped our visual interfaces off their ornamentations to allow a more authentic approach to visual aesthetics.

Gestalt Theory

Gestalt is a German word that carries much importance, especially for us as designers. Let’s have a close look at its principles so that we can see how much information this little word encompasses!
The central principle to the Gestalt theory was neatly summarized by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka: "The whole is other than the sum of the parts." The human eye and brain perceive a unified shape in a different way to the way they perceive the individual parts of those shapes. This global whole is a separate entity that is not necessarily formed by the sum of its parts. When we fully understand Gestalt design principles, we can utilize them to create more interesting and engaging visual experiences for website and app users. You can take advantage of these laws to design more thoughtfully and effectively, knowing exactly how your work can impact your users.

Video

Joe Leech shows us how psychology helps frame what we’re seeing in user research. He articulates why the superpower we need is understanding how business works. He inspires us get out of our seat and talk to executives in the organization more about the business. He also challenges us to not just always be shipping, but always be shipping the right things.